


Pure As Snow

by Framlingem



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, Prequel, Sad, Worldbuilding, Yuletide Chat Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:35:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8889238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Framlingem/pseuds/Framlingem
Summary: Johnny Jaqobis didn't grow up in the Quad. His brother left long ago; and then all his ties to home unravelled entirely.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [valderys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/valderys/gifts).



> With thanks to ibble for listening to me wibble, and for reading this over and catching some things.

The day Mom finally laid her bones down and died on the way back from the market in Kipsee, it was snowing hard. Johnny hadn’t wanted her to go, but there was work to be done splitting the wood for winter and making sure the generator was weatherproof and working, and there’d been a need for food, and she’d slipped out while he wasn’t watching. He’d come back in from out back, stamping his feet, saying “whoooo, Mom, that’s the last of the wood, and it feels like we’re going to need it,” and she’d been gone.

Of course he knew. He grabbed a fresh scarf and his dad’s old jacket just in case and started walking. A quarter of the way to Kipsee, half-blinded by the wind that was picking up, he nearly tripped over her. The snow by her head was red with the blood she’d choked on at the last, frozen to small clumps. Ice had collected on her eyelashes. Diamonds and rubies, at last, thought Johnny, before he picked her up and carried her home. He hadn’t had any problems carrying her for a while now, as he got bigger and she got smaller, and as he stumbled through the building drifts, she wasn’t the heaviest thing on his shoulders.

Back home, he laid her on the bed, atop the covers. It was dark out already -- the dark came early, this time of year. This was the first big freeze of the winter. If he waited, the ground might freeze.

And so it was that Johnny Jaqobis, of  _ those Jaqobis, just out of town, you know the family _ , got the spade and dug a grave in the middle of the first snowstorm of the year. He finished around dawn, stripped out of his filthy, soaking, muddy clothes before going into the nice clean house, and washed himself down with snow. The freezing roughness of it burnt, and made him stop thinking for a while. He paused a little before going in. His  _ mother _ was inside, and he was  _ naked _ . But then, if he couldn’t be naked in front of his own mother, who’d seen him naked more than any other woman alive, who could he be naked in front of? She wouldn’t see him anyway.

And so it was that Johnny Jaqobis, his mother’s son, stood naked by her last bed and undressed her as gently as he could, and dug under the bed for her best and favourite dress, the one she didn’t wear much, and put it on her. He brushed her hair with the bone-backed brush his brother had bought her, before he left, and tied it back for her, the way she’d worn it when she had two young boys underfoot all the time. 

And so it was that Johnny Jaquobis, the brother who stayed, dressed in his own best clothes and carried his mother out back to the grave dug the other side of the yard from the well, and let her fall into it. The earth mixed with the snow, still falling, as he shovelled it in.

Once that was done, he set out to walk into town again. The cold air numbed his face, but a quarter of the way there, not far from where his mother had hacked her last breath into the snow, the sun came out. It shone on the snow, it shone on Johnny, and it shone on a tree that had been taken by surprise by winter and still had some of its leaves clinging to their twigs. He blinked at it. 

“Huh,” he said. His breath fogged out of his scarf, which was already rough with rime against his mouth. He watched it, feeling like one of the leaves should fall for him. As he wasn’t in a story, the leaves stayed stubbornly put. He carried on, and walked the rest of the way to Kipsee to see about setting his mother’s affairs in order. 

He stopped in at the post office on his way to the bank.

“No word, Johnny,” said Gail at the front desk, who’d been girls together with his mom. She had a smile for him, and something in him thawed a little at the sight of it. He took off his scarf, scraping his own frozen breath over his cheek as he did. 

“That’s okay, Gail,” he said. “I need to send him another message anyway. Can I use your terminal?”

“Of course,” she said. She frowned at him. “Everything all right? How’s your mom?”

“Best she’s been in a while,” he answered. “She’s feeling no pain. She’s got no,” and he swallowed, “no problems at all.”

He might have cried a little. Gail might have come out from behind the desk, turned the sign on the door to “Closed”, and given him a hug. It might have happened that way. 

Regardless of what might have happened, Johnny dictated one long letter into the terminal. Then he erased it. The message he sent was three sentences long.

“D’avin, it’s too late. She’s gone. You don’t need to come home anymore.”

He turned around at the door, and said, “That’ll be the last one, Gail. Screw him anyway. I’m gonna... I’m gonna go. Thanks for everything.”

He stopped at the bank just long enough to find out that there weren’t any affairs to settle, nothing left to help see him out of town -- quite the opposite, in fact, the bank would be taking back the property as soon as they could -- and hitched a ride into the main city

The city wasn’t much like Kipsee. It was brightly lit and dirty -- how could something be both bright and dirty at the same time? There was a bar, and he ducked into it. The bartender eyed him up and down. 

“Ma’am,” he said, “If you need me to work for a while to pay it off I’ll clear tables and wash things, but you would not believe the day I’ve had, and I could really, really use a drink.”

She considered him a while. “Fine,” she said. “We do food in the evenings. Clean the ovens out and I’ll give you enough of a tab for a drink and a meal.”

Cleaning the ovens was hot enough work to thaw him out a bit, but then it took him through thawed and out the other side. He burned his arm on a still-hot grill, reaching in to the back of the oven, and focussed on that to avoid thinking too much. The pain felt clean somehow, and so did the ache that built in the small of his back from the awkward posture. The ovens took on a gleam. The bartender cames to inspect them, and whistled.

“They haven’t looked that good since they were new, kid.”

Johnny didn’t think he’d been a kid in a long time, but he nodded anyway.

“Job like that,” said the bartender, “ and I think you’ve earned a couple of drinks. What’ll it be? I’ll get you some food and it’ll be ready for you once you’ve washed up. Sink’s over there.”

“Something strong,” said Johnny. “Like I said, it’s been a hell of a couple of days.”

She shrugged, said, “your funeral,” and left. If he’d been more himself, Johnny would have enjoyed the sight of her leaving. As it was, he turned to the sink, stripped off the apron he’d borrowed, and sluiced down his arms, running the water as cold as he could bear it. Then he ran the water colder. 

Back at the bar, the bartender waved him over to a corner table, small and cramped. It suited him fine. The food was nothing fancy -- burger, fries -- and the drink was a tumblr full of something colourless and odourless. He held the first sip on his tongue and thought it might eat through his flesh and dissolve his bones. It was perfect. He swallowed, and it ripped all the way down his esophagus. He sipped again, and again, and his burger got cold and his lips went numb, and he almost didn’t notice when someone slipped into the chair across the tiny table and grabbed his arm.

“Hey,” mumbled Johnny. “I need that. F’r drinking.”

“Nasty burn you’ve got there,” said the stranger, and Johnny focussed on him. Blue eyes. Bit of a beard. An expression on his face like he could wait all day for an answer, whether he got one or not. Robes. Something twitched in the back of Johnny’s mind.

“You’re a scarback,” he said. “The hell are you doing all the way out at the ass-end of the J?”

The monk shrugged. “We go places, sometimes. We have our reasons.”

“Yeah? What possible reason could you have to come here?”

“We had a pickup to make.”

Johnny pulled his arm away from the monk’s gentle hold and picked up his burger. “That’s nice. So why are you over here, getting between me and my drink? This drink and this burger,” he said, waving it in the monk’s face, “are the best thing that’s happened to me in days. Weeks.” He paused. “Years, maybe. Wow. That hot sauce is hot.”

The monk shrugged. “I saw your arm. I know a bit about burns and cuts. Call it professional interest, I guess. It doesn’t look like you’ve treated it at all. You want to be careful of infection.”

Johnny looked the monk in the eyes and slowly, deliberately, put down his burger. He picked up his tumbler of hooch, took one last sip, and poured what was left over the red and blistering weal on his forearm. The world went white for a minute or so, and when colours started to seep back in around the edges of his vision, he’d dropped the glass and the monk was looking at him oddly. Johnny couldn’t quite figure out the monk’s face. It looked... like a well of water, somehow. No. Like a tree in a desert, with a taproot all the way down to an aquifer. Or something. Clearly the hooch had been good hooch.

The monk just sat there, waiting for Johnny to say something.

“Disinfected enough for you?”

“I’m more interested in why that was a better option than the ointment I was going to offer you.”

Johnny didn’t really have an answer for that and opted for glaring instead. The monk nodded, and stood up.

“If you change your mind about the ointment, my ship’s in bay fourteen at the spaceport,” he said. “I’d recommend it. It’s good stuff.” Then he left.

Johnny watched him go. He ate his cold burger with hot sauce. He drank his other drink. He left the bar, and stared into the bright streetlight overhead until he was dazzled and he could tell himself his eyes only stung due to the assault of so many photons. When he looked away, they took a while to adjust. Greenish-purple ghosts chased each other across his sight. He tapped a passerby on the shoulder.

“‘Scuse me,” he said, enunciating carefully. “Which way is the spaceport? Please.”

“Hang a right at that intersection there and you’ll be able to see it,” said the man, and vanished into the crowd before Johnny could ask any followup questions. When he reached the corner, the spaceport blazed more brightly than anything else, and it only took an hour of trudging to reach. It was a ways out of the city, but it wasn’t like Johnny wasn’t used to walking. Bay fourteen was about seventy degrees around to the left of the ring of ship berths. Someone had painted the monk’s ship with a pattern of green and leafy vines. They didn’t do a lot to disguise that the ship was scruffy as hell. He could see three things wrong with it from here.

Johnny walked up to the hatch and knocked. It creaked open immediately, as though it had been waiting for him. The monk was standing on the threshold. He nodded at Johnny, and stood aside, making a space.

“I found my mother,” Johnny said. “And there was a tree, with leaves. In the snow. And I could use a taproot. Does that make sense?”

“Come on in,” said the monk. “There’s a spare berth.”

“I’ll work my way,” said Johnny. “I noticed there’s some wear on your port thruster assembly.”

“I already said you could come. Won’t turn down the maintenance, though.”

 

And so Johnny Jaqobis, of the outer edge of the J cluster, packed up what was left of his dignity and went off to be a monk.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, Valderys! I've found I can't get this story out of my head, and, if it's all right with you, I'd like to expand this a bit and then write a sequel for you too. May I?


End file.
